(1) I ONLY READ 36 BOOKS THIS YEAR. . .
I AM always jealous of supreme readers :
Harold Bloom read 1000 pages an hour in his heyday, — and he wasn’t munching on A Court of Thorns and Roses (2015), dude was mowing thru Clarissa (1748), yearly.
Or Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) who read Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, — and could recite the Divine Comedy forwards and back, off the top of his head. . .
And he was incredibly handsome! No wonder he was poisoned! Such an outpouring of cosmic gifts must NOT go unpunished!
Pico’s gargantuan, precocious reading led to his 900 Conclusions (1486), such as :
“A person who has once attained happiness is not held back from it by delirium or drowsiness.”
(2) READING IS BOWEL-TUNING. . .
FOR AN artist: Ur task is to prime your intestines for a triumphant, generational defecation. . . which is why sometimes finishing a book is irrelevant. . .
James Joyce gives the impression of never having finished reading a book. . .
LOOKSEE : the recalcitrant thief, stretched out on his bed, — Nora & the kids yelling, arrears-hungry landlords knocking at the door, —
sifting blindly thru bric a brac to pile on his enormous rubbish heap,
“For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints. . .”
(3) I READ SLOWLY, DROWSILY. . .
FALLING ASLEEP, having to stand up to keep myself erect, focused. . . rereading paragraphs & sentences several times over for beauty & sense. . .
On the train: peacocky, ostentatious, will anyone notice my exquisite taste. . . the 6AM construction workers don’t give a s**t. . .
Only once: a lady in her 50s, whispered in my ear as she walked off at 34th Street, with regard to my Go Down Moses (1940) : what a smart young man you are. . .
Sit there, flipping pages, let years pile on years, let incomprehension wash over you; —like the daily progress of a tree, you start collecting rings. . .
(4) I REREAD ULYSSES IN FEBRUARY. . .
I READ it for the first time in 2020; I was 23, charging thru the canon like a dodo-hunter on 16th Century Mauritius, fervent, foolish :
“If they save us from hunger in this world, then beyond, in Christ’s kingdom, our salvations must be, in like measure, inextricable. Otherwise the dodoes would be only what they appear as in the world’s illusory light—only our prey.
God could not be that cruel.”
The book was a bucketlist checkoff : I emerged eye-rolly, unscathed. I blamed the book : — it’s overrated, I gavelled secretly.
It’s hard to admit you’re not as good a reader as you think; it’s why people vituperate against the Great Works. . .
But some people read like the dudes who walk into my boxing class, demanding to fight the coach, with their jeans on, gloves on the wrong hands. . .
If Ulysses (1922) is the first book you pick up, trying to start a reading habit, it’s gonna BEAT THE S**T OUTTA U. . .
(5) READING, I WANT TO BE. . .
1) ENTERTAINED &
2) DOUSED BY TRANSCENDENT MAGNIFICENCE.
Those feelings used to be mutually exclusive, but thru years of diligent page-flipping, they’re starting to converge.
Tell me : Why would transcendence be easy? . . .
I used to not be able to read good in portuguese; — even though I’m fluent, it was a challenge to read literature.
The best teacher I ever had, Erroll McDonald, mentioned an untranslatable book he called “the Brasilian Ulysses” : Grande Sertão: Veredas (1955). . .
Not only had I not read it : I hadn’t even heard of it. I was humiliated : there was an enormous gap in my Brasilian cultural inheritance.
I ordered a copy. I spent an entire month doing almost nothing but reading Grande Sertão out loud. . . it felt like training for a fight; I’d wake up some mornings battered & bruised, wondering what the hell this was even worth!
The truth was in the effort; by the end I felt the scintillating magnificence; — but I wouldn’t say I was entertained. . .
When I reread Grande Sertão, I realized it’s actually the most entertaining book in the world. . .
(6) FOR YEARS, I COLLECTED PELTS. . .
AN OBSESSIVE book-logger; scared to quit anything I started, in thrall to my ledger.
When I was 23, I read the Divine Comedy in three days, marked each canticle down as a finished book, padded myself on the back for being so smart. . .
— (TO THINK YOU’RE “FINISHED” WITH DANTE!!!) —
Did I know the Divine Comedy ? F**K NO !
Why does your mind presume to flight?
You are like the imperfect grub, the worm
Before it has attained its final form.
Tracking books is the ANTITHESIS of the spirit of Literature : U are an apple-watch porting, sleep-score toting TART . . . submitting Ur life to the market. . .
Is Literature an arena for FREEDOM, or another thing to neatly package and SELL?
(7) IT HELPS THAT I’M STUPID. . .
TRULY, I LOVE everything I read; — book-hate ain’t an attitude I can relate to.
The first serious book I ever read was Crime and Punishment (1866). I read it over two months when I was 17.
I was in the remedial English class because I never did any work; I didn’t have a single school-supply my Senior Year of high-school:
I was the annoying b*****d always asking to borrow pen & paper(; — . . . , I was voted Most School Spirit thanks to a very successful ironic-cheer campaign. . .
My rival Ivan Makysmovich won Most Literary, Funniest, and Most Likely to Succeed; —worse : he ended up making a grand life for himself! That b*****d!)
I started stealing classics from the very limited school library.
I could hardly understand anything that was going on, but I was immersed in the feeling of Raskolnikov’s guilt.
It seeped so deeply into my brain I still have dreams that I committed his crime. . .
(8) I AM HOGWILD FOR THAT KIND OF SEEPAGE. . .
YOU’D THINK time would calcify my tendencies, but thru light, accumulated brain damage and the malleability of innate-idiocy, I feel more porous than ever. . .
I am a deranged reader; . . . the first truly deranged reader I ever met was Sean; he’d start talking about books and he’d be completely f*****g wrong!
All his readings were idiosyncratic cauldrons, smelting down the same question:
HOW IS THIS BOOK ABOUT ME?
U must attack a book like the author is trying to tell U a secret about UR life and everything depends on U finding it.
The ONLY books worthy of framing your life around are the ones that truly reward that kind of excavation. . .
Be an archeologist : unearth a PYRAMID.
(9) WHEN I WAS A KID. . .
I WAS obsessed with secrets. . .
We had a project in 2nd Grade, we had to interview our parents. . . and there was a surprisingly invasive question in the interview,
“Have you ever been married before?”
I asked my mom, knowing she had only been married to my dad, and I said, “I’ll fill in NO obviously.”
She said, “Well, Harold, I should tell you something. . .” and she rolled off a harrowing, grim story about her first marriage. . .
I was SHOCKED. My mother had a secret life I knew nothing about. All I could think: what were the secrets other people were hiding?
(10) I AM A PRURIENT SECRET-HOUND. . .
IT’S NOT true, what I said earlier, that ENTERTAINMENT & TRANSCENDENCE had been mutually exclusive feelings for me.
They always converged when my parents would tell me stories about their lives, and the lives of the people around them. . . everyday I learned the world was richer, more hilarious and dramatic than I’d ever thought possible.
My dad had this friend Fish (nicknamed b/c he was Catholic & a drunk); his girlfriend died and my mom felt bad so she invited him to come down to Rio and stay with us. . .
He had stopped drinking, but the caipirinha-lure was too hard to resist: he relapsed. The only rule was don’t bring nobody to the house. . . when my parents were out one night, he brought a hooker to the house.
I was 10. I walked into the kitchen and he was in there in his underwear next to a young lady I didn’t know. . . he said, “Harold! Hey do you have any money???”
I broke my piggy-bank open, but it was short of what he needed. . . when my parents came home, they were not happy.
My dad took him down to the sidewalk and slapped him right in the head, told him to get the f**k out of Brasil while my mom paid the woman. . .
(11) I AM ADDICTED TO STORIES. . .
FISH IS now a therapist for BetterHelp. . .
I’m a fiend for these stories; I can’t get enough.
I got into literature b/c there’s never enough oral juicy gossip; when U read the great writers, U read a distillation of the most interesting s**t they seen, heard, or stole.
It is an endless repository of the abundance of LIFE!
The deranged reader gets sick like Don Quixote, there is too much life building up inside of me and yet not enough, I must go outside, I must create something,
“The truth is that when his mind was completely gone, he had the strangest thought any lunatic in the world ever had, which was that it seemed reasonable and necessary to him. . . to become a knight errant and travel the world with his armor and horse to seek adventures. . . righting all manner of wrongs and by ending those wrongs, winning eternal renown and everlasting fame. . .”
I read because I love LIFE and I’ll never get enough of it before I’m dead.
WHY DO U READ?
